The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) (3 page)

I cannot say my faith is strong,
I dare not hope my love is great,
But strength and love to Thee belong,
O, do not leave me desolate.

Anne’s lyric poems, which she called ‘pillars of witness’
²¹
recorded a hope without which she felt her spirit would fail her that ‘Even the wicked shall at last / Be fitted for the skies’ (‘A Word to the Calvinists’, 37–8). It was a desperate issue, always a source of introspective conflict, to which she accorded the status of ‘hope’, never a dogmatic certainty; and
Wildfell Hall
articulates that conflict, not its resolution. Anne Brontë had been subject to periods of religious doubt when, like Branwell, she wondered if God existed at all; and, if he did, could he care for her? Her austere quatrains wrestle with doubt. Branwell too had wrestled and been thrown. Then he had run away:

         ‘Tis something far more dread
Which haunts me in my dying bed!
I have lost – long lost – my trust in Thee!
I cannot hope that Thou wilt hear
The unrepentant sinner’s prayer!
So, whither must my spirit flee
For succour through Eternity?
                                           (‘Harriet’ (2))

Wildfell Hall
attempts to encounter the terrors which were the
converse of Branwell’s self-consciously Byronic defiance of heaven. Huntingdon, more trivial and worldly than Branwell, becomes a shallow Faustus in his ending: ‘“But death
will
come – it is coming now – fast, fast! – and – Oh, if I
could
believe there was nothing after!”…“I
can’t
repent; I only fear.”’ (p. 445). After his death, Helen clings to her hope that her husband’s soul ‘is not lost, and God, who hateth nothing that He hath made,
will
bless it in the end” ‘ (p. 447). It is necessary for a secular reader to appreciate that Anne Brontë took her faith with literality: if God was real, he was real not nominally, hypothetically or on Sundays, but in the here-and-now of every day, in an urgent sense. But people do not see him; the material world is mistaken for reality, while the air throngs with transparent agencies of light and the legion shadows of evil. They do not hear their own casual blasphemies blackening their tongues and turning all their speeches into self-damning ironies. The drama of the ‘diary’ narrative uncovers the eternal implications of casual deeds and conventional language, especially the language of profane love. ‘“Sweet angel, I adore you!’”, says Huntingdon, manipulating Helen with exploitative demands and familiar touching of her body; but her aunt interrupts, ‘And I left him, muttering maledictions against his evil angel’ (p. 147). Rescued from the attentions of the unappealing Mr Wilmot, she feels ‘It was like turning from some purgatorial fiend to an angel of light, come to announce that the season of torment was past’ (p. 146). But the season of torment is just beginning, and the bright-haired, beautiful young man is racing his fellow reprobates down the road to hell – and winning.

If
Wildfell Hall
is a dissenting sister of
Wuthering Heists
, it is also spiritual kin to Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
. Sharing the passionate truth to self of Charlotte’s novel and with something of the mutinous energy of Jane’s ‘I’, which begets itself in the reader who shares her journey, the ‘diary’ section of
Wildfell Hall
(Chapters 16–44) also represents its territories as landscapes of the mind, viewed in the light of eternity. Jane makes Bunyanesque linear passage from one emblematic resting-place and tempting-place to another – from Gateshead, through Lowood, Thprnfield, Whitcross, to Moor End, whence, having acquired an independent inheritance and the romantic
equivalent of the Puritan ‘call’, she circles back via the destroyed Thornfield, the site of Rochester’s atonement, to sanctuary at Ferndene. But Helen’s journey, from Staningley to Grassdale, escaping to Wildfell, only to return via Grassdale to Staningley, ultimate sole heir to both, is viewed both retrospectively and prospectively from the way-stage of Wildfell. The ‘progress’ is therefore not as clearly marked. The struggling, implicated quality of human life is more evident in
Wildfell Hall
as Helen is tainted by the corruption she cannot escape: ‘I HATE him! The word stares me in the face like a guilty confession, but it is true: I hate him – I hate him!’ (p. 308); ‘Instead of being humbled and purified by my afflictions, I feel that they are turning my nature into gall’ (p. 313). Grassdale bears a weight of symbolic meaning comparable with the pilgrim’s sojourns in
Jane Eyre
: at first it is a fool’s paradise, then a false paradise. Lush and tender descriptions of its natural beauty are blighted not only by the loneliness of Huntingdon’s absence but by the lurking of a snake in the grass, Hargrave, a cold comment upon the intemperately warm-hearted attempt to master Jane by Rochester. Insinuating himself into Helen’s good graces in a scene of wistfully Edenic beauty, Hargrave resembles Milton’s Satan’s slyly ingratiating approaches to Eve in
Paradise Lost
. The sense of paradisal innocence is conveyed by a tenderly observed scene of play between mother, nurse and child in the grace of a ‘sweet, warm evening’ in the park:

I was standing with Rachel beside the water, amusing the laughing baby in her arms with a twig of willow laden with golden catkins, when greatly to my surprise, he entered the park, mounted on his costly black hunter, and crossed over the grass to meet me. (pp. 246–7)

This sinister figure again penetrates the lyrical scene of Helen kneeling before her baby, ‘having gathered a handful of bluebells and wild roses… and presenting them, one by one, to the grasp of his tiny fingers’ (p. 250). Hargrave, the dark mounted figure on the ‘costly black hunter’ hunts Helen with sexual threat which culminates in the chess-game of Chapter 33, so reminiscent of the chess-scene in Middleton’s tragedy,
Women Beware Women
.
²²
Grassdale represents a paradise already lost in the moment of enjoyment: Helen must
substitute for its idyll the Miltonic ‘paradise within thee, happier far’ (XII. 587) in her flight from its bounds. The house becomes a hell on earth, and the repeated ‘hell’ chimes with Helen’s name. Her sufferings culminate in the detection of Huntingdon and his mistress in sexual play in the shrubbery, where Helen’s husband swears ‘“by all that’s sacred”’ that he no longer loves his wife (p. 303). In this moment of absolute affliction, the prose deepens to a throbbing biblical intensity reminiscent
of Jane Eyre
: in the extremity of need is vouchsafed a breathing of grace and the fellowship of the creation in a vision of the stars: ‘I knew their God was mine, and He was strong to save and swift to hear’ (p. 303).

One of the novel’s triumphs is to make Arthur Huntingdon not a fiend incarnate but an immature, boyish figure, with real gaiety, some warmth and charm, who feels as deep a tenderness for his wife as he knows how to feel. Possessive and despotic in his initial affection for Helen, he lavishes affectionate attention on her, and craves total attention in return. Jealous of all that distracts her from him (‘when he sees me occupied with a book, he won’t let me rest till I close it’ (p. 208), Huntingdon has no inner resources and hence is easily bored, filling the time when Helen runs out of amusements for him by ‘lolling’ beside her on the sofa trying to arouse her jealousy by spinning tales of former amours. Their honeymoon is a bizarre scamper round Europe, which is no novelty to him and whose fascinations he begrudges to his wife ‘in as much as it proved that I could take delight in anything disconnected with himself (p. 203). Objecting to her religious devotion, he explains that ‘“it is enough to make one jealous of one’s Maker – which is very wrong, you know; so don’t excite such wicked passions again, for my soul’s sake” ‘ (p. 204). Helen’s locking of her door against her spouse is a memorable act of feminist defiance; it is also an episode in a banal household row, which reflects credit on neither party. The next morning Huntingdon seethes with malign sulks; it rains; he yawns, fidgets, drinks, bangs doors and strikes the cocker spaniel off ‘with a smart blow’. The dog retreats and, when its master wants to pet it again, cleaves to Helen and will not come. ‘Enraged at this, his
master snatched up a heavy book and hurled it at his head’ (p. 212). Helen lets it out Such minor fracas are proleptic. Helen will love; be abused; recoil in anger and hurt; and, for her recoil (interpreted as rejection) be rejected; then she will reject in earnest. The particular quarrel is resolved within the chapter, in which the tension is broken by her yielding to his not very abject penitence and caresses. But it sets up a pattern of deterioration which is mercilessly inexorable, for Helen’s very character in its forthrightness and integrity have the ironic effect of alienating her husband. The narrative moves in a rhythm of mounting misery with pauses and reprieves; chapters end on upbeats of hope or downbeats of apprehension as skilfully managed dynamic scenes of quarrel are played out, in which both manoeuvre for advantage. ‘What shall I do with the serious part of myself?’ ends Chapter 22 ominously. ‘I trust we shall be happy yet,’ Chapter 24 falteringly concludes.

Long before Helen has consciously recognized her bad bargain, the reader has understood that there is nothing to Arthur Huntingdon. It is not that he is an intrinsically evil person. He is a brat. The centre is painfully hollow. Even Huntingdon seems conscious of this absence of something vital in his human make-up: gentle when ill after his first major debauch, he turns thankfully to Helen, as though her resources could serve for them both. A real pathos surrounds him. But he must fill his emptiness with excitement and intrigue, and in the measure that Helen withdraws from this compulsion, she helps to empty him further, so that he must have more gratification. He pours drink into himself; fills his house with the roaring fraternity; courts that fine animal, Annabella; abuses Helen. Helen’s tenderness is hard to kill; its durability is expressed when she sees a letter in Hargrave’s hand, ‘with Arthur’s still beloved hand on the address’ (p. 251). The author does not allow us to forget how sexually attractive and childishly appealing Huntingdon is: how puzzled (when he can be bothered to think) by the circumstances he is creating. But Huntingdon’s behaviour is not an isolated instance; it belongs to a social norm for élite males. In the confraternity, Anne Brontë studies the dynamics of group mentality, the mutual reinforcement of male ‘club’ behaviour. The melancholy and Byronic Lord Lowborough’s
betrayal to drink, drugs and suicidal despair, taunted with unmanliness by his ‘friends’ and his adulterous wife; Hattersley’s abuse of his ‘invitingly meek and mim’ wife, the timorous Milicent; the cynicism of Hargrave’s sexual approaches and Grimsby’s squalid antics represent a group code which not only legitimates but authorizes infantilism as a norm. Hattersley is redeemed; Hargrave repelled; Lowborough divorces, to begin a new life: only Huntingdon is entirely destitute of hope. Anne Brontë focuses the nihilism attendant on terminal weakness and self-indulgence; spoilt in this life, he is spoilt for the next world. We smile at his Branwellian antics in church, perusing his Prayer Book upside down, adopting a ‘puritanical air of mock solemnity’: ‘“I’ll come home sighing like a furnace, and full of the savour and unction of dear Mr Blatant’s discourse –”’ (p. 174). Bran well too had monkeyed about in his pew and had a running joke about how ‘two fireballs’ (brandy with egg) make the tippler ‘a brand plucked from the burning’
²³
– Wesley’s favourite text for his own conversion. Branwell too had been spoilt, and lost. As his friend Grundy put it, ‘he was just a man moving in a mist who lost his way’.
²⁴
The reality of such loss and such burning are borne out in Huntingdon’s death-scene, an evasion of ‘repentance’ by one who has misplaced his soul and now, in extreme need, cannot lay claim to it: ‘“I’m not going to die yet. – I can’t and won’t.” ’ He clings to the person who has kept hers (‘“Helen, you
must
save me!” ’) and tries to grapple her down into the grave with him, to answer for him. His last words are ‘“Don’t leave me!’” (pp. 441–7). He dies, indeed, without being weaned.

Helen’s testament is a story of double temptation and double failure: Huntingdon’s and her own. The diary throws the mature woman of 1828 back to her susceptible, needy and spirited girlhood at the beginning of the decade, the pert niece of a severe aunt whose anxious piety is counter-productive in provoking mischievous answers. When Aunt Maxwell points out the horror of finding your husband ‘“a worthless reprobate, or even an impractical fool”’, Helen flightily wonders, ‘“But what are all the poor fools and reprobates to do, aunt?”’ and mentions the danger of depopulation (p. 132). The levity in Helen is evidently fair game for Huntingdon’s
sparkling flightiness: but Helen is a complex, deep, and deepening character. The notion she boasts of ‘saving’ her irresponsible spouse – a favourite female myth of the mid-nineteenth century – is exposed as rash arrogance, the tragic flaw of pride which brings her falling headlong. It unleashes in Huntingdon a Nemesis whose black taunts she has herself invited: ‘“Yes,
now
, my immaculate angel…”’ (p. 441). Helen’s diary plots her downward course into disillusion, hurt, rage, moral petrification and embitterment. To her alarm, she begins to adapt to the debased norms of Grassdale,

till I am familiarized with vice and almost a partaker in his sins. Things that formerly shocked and disgusted me now seem only natural… Fool that I was to dream that I had strength and purity enough to save myself and him! (p. 262)

Her temper sours; her tongue lashes out, for ‘I am no angel’ (p. 267). Helen wrestles not only against her husband but against herself, for her own soul. The two climaxes of action come in Chapter 33, the anguished scene in the shrubbery in which she comes face to face with her husband’s adultery; and Chapter 40, the centre of violation, in which Huntingdon rakes through her diary, discovers her savings and has her paintings burned, a spiritual rape. Huntingdon’s early proposal to ‘“Let me have its bowels then”’, as he eviscerates her portfolio, and rifles the contents (p. 160), proleptically foreshadows the vandalizing of Helen’s inner and private world and the destruction of her means of subsistence.